Family Owned Businesses

We advise family-owned businesses on the full spectrum of legal, tax and governance matters. We have a clear understanding of the personal and family dynamics that underpin decision-making, and how the tax strategy of a corporate group interacts with the tax position of shareholders. Our clients range from first-generation owners to long-established family groups with complex shareholdings and multi-generational succession plans.

Family-owned businesses often face unique challenges. Strategic decisions may be shaped not only by commercial considerations but also by values, legacy, and the expectations of family members who may or may not be directly involved in the business. We help clients navigate these tensions while delivering clear, practical and strategic advice.

We are experienced in advising boards and management teams on how best to engage with individual shareholders and family trusts. This includes everything from capital and governance structuring to understanding the tax considerations that arise from family ownership.

Our advice is informed by seamless collaboration between our Tax, Private Client and Corporate practice groups who combine legal expertise with market-leading experience working with international family-owned businesses. We take a holistic view of the business, the individuals behind it, and the complex ways in which they interact to ensure that the needs and competing considerations are balanced and addressed.

Work highlights include:

• formulating and implementing the reorganisation of a family-owned international group of companies, including a private bank and real estate, venture capital and private equity subsidiaries. This process takes account of regulatory, tax and company law frameworks in the UK, the EU and a number of individual operating jurisdictions;
• developing the holding structure of a family-controlled global conglomerate, with a particular focus on transitioning the structure from one of the static business interests to a broad-based investment platform. This facilitates the long-term strategy of the group and succession planning of underlying shareholders;
• advising several branches of an international business-owning family on a sustainable structure to facilitate investment of business income into new business ventures. This is to benefit the next generation of the family and provide stronger governance rules;
• advising a multinational family-owned media and creative industries group on a succession planning reorganisation involving the carve-out of private fund investments from its trading group. This included designing an innovative structure for the UK side of the restructuring, navigating complex UK tax rules alongside far-reaching European inheritance tax provisions to facilitate the disposal of target assets;
• advising a multi-generational family business with global reach, on a complex restructuring of a series of operating and investment businesses worth in excess of €10bn. This included unwinding an obsolete pre-existing holding structure and creating a new holding structure for over forty family stakeholders;
• advising the trustee shareholders of an international, family-controlled trading business preparing for a strategic transaction, involving the introduction of significant third-party equity investment;
• acting as primary legal counsel to a high-profile entrepreneurial family with a multinational trading group and substantial investment portfolio. We have a longstanding relationship as trusted adviser to the founder and their family office, with much of our recent work focused on group and international tax aspects of their business, intra-group transactions and succession planning; and
• advising the owners of a significant family-owned bloodstock, farming and property development business on the restructuring of its operations to manage a changing taxation environment and the transfer of the business to the next generation of the family.